The Oscar Whiteness Machine

The failure of the Academy Awards to recognize black performers and filmmakers creates a dangerously circular system that robs the next generation of daring and diverse cinema.

Photograph by Toby Canham / Getty

The Oscars almost never get it right. Alfred Hitchcock never won one; Elaine May has never won one. Barbara Stanwyck never won an Oscar; Robert Mitchum never got a Best Actor nomination. The intersection between the art of movies and the Oscars is coincidental at best. Many great black actors have won Academy Awards (most recently, Forest Whitaker was named Best Actor in 2007, Halle Berry won Best Actress in 2002, Lupita Nyong’o was Best Supporting Actress in 2014, and Morgan Freeman got the Best Supporting Actor award in 2005). Many more have been ignored (Alfre Woodard was nominated once, in 1984; Danny Glover, never). Yet the blinding whiteness of the Oscars this year meshes with another infuriating long-term pattern: the whiting-out of movies about black experience.

“Do the Right Thing,” released in 1989, received two Oscar nominations—Spike Lee, for the script, and Danny Aiello, for Supporting Actor. This year, “Creed” has one, for Sylvester Stallone, for Supporting Actor. By contrast, almost all the nominations for Best Actor that black actors have received have been for performances in movies made by white directors. (An exception: Denzel Washington won for “Training Day,” directed by Antoine Fuqua.) No black woman has ever won Best Actress for a movie made by a black director. That’s a shocking fact, and it suggests the narrow range of subjects and experiences that are likely to be celebrated by the movie industry in its own self-defining awards ceremonies.

Yet the Oscars have to be taken seriously because the Oscars have a peculiar echo-chamber value in determining the ups and downs of industry players. As Willie Sutton may have said of banks, it’s where the money is. Stallone’s performance in “Creed” is excellent and fully deserving of recognition; but by honoring only Stallone from among its performers, the Academy is, in effect, declaring that the most important and accomplished part of the movie is the one that displays a white man’s experience. That’s what the Academy did, too, when it nominated only Aiello from the cast of “Do the Right Thing.”

Many of the best movies by black filmmakers have gone utterly unnoticed by the Academy—whether films by Charles Burnett or Julie Dash—and others have vanished literally unreleased (such as Kathleen Collins’s great “Losing Ground,” from 1982, for instance, which comes out on DVD in April). It’s true that these are independent films, which are frequently off the Academy’s radar—but not always. What about such recognized independents as “Beasts of the Southern Wild” (a movie with a mainly black cast and a white director), “Winter’s Bone,” “Juno,” or “Little Miss Sunshine”?

An Oscar or a nomination gives an artist’s career a boost, and for now, those boosts—those roles, that financing—remain limited mainly to white filmmakers and actors. Of course, many of the movies and artists who get this boost aren’t necessarily topflight. The Academy has an appalling record of bestowing prizes and nominations on movies of an astonishing mediocrity. But the actors—especially the actors—in many of those movies nonetheless are able to channel their newfound prestige, and the potential backing that comes with it, into worthy and enduringly important projects. And it takes a collective tide of artistic activity to thrust the most interesting and daring movies to the surface. It’s never good when bad movies are upheld as among the best—but it’s even worse when the distribution of honors is discriminatory and thwarts not only the most talented artists individually but the entire creative environment that would yield the next generation’s innovators. The Academy’s failure to acknowledge the achievements of black actors—even (as with many white actors) in Oscar-aimed movies of less than the highest artistry—inhibits the very future of filmmaking by black artists.

The underlying issue of the Academy’s failure to recognize black artists is the presumption that baseline experience is white experience and that black life is a niche phenomenon, life with an asterisk. Many of the great classic jazz and blues recordings were marketed as “race records.” To this day, the Academy proceeds as if movies about black experience were race movies. The result is that only narrow and fragmentary views of the lives of African-Americans ever make it to the screen—and I think that this is not an accident. If the stories were told—if the daily lives and inner lives, the fears and fantasies, the historical echoes and the anticipations of black Americans were as copiously unfolded in movies as are those of whites—then lots of white folks would be forced to confront their historical and contemporary shame. They’d no longer be able to claim ignorance of what they’d like not to know—which includes their own complicity in a rigged system.

This system is a monster of circularity. The Oscars are chosen by the overwhelmingly white Academy, whose members are chosen from the overwhelmingly white movie industry, and it overwhelmingly bestows awards on white creators, thus sustaining and reinforcing the industry’s overwhelming whiteness, which is then replicated and perpetuated in the Academy.

Yet the problem isn’t only that of the Academy and its failure to recognize the best of movies and artists. Critics hardly do better. Compare the Academy Award nominations with the results of critics’ groups this year. Here’s the Metacritic roundup of critics’-group awards. Its Best Picture top eight differs from the Oscar nominations in only one title—the critics have “Carol” in lieu of “Bridge of Spies.” Three of the five directors on the lists are the same as the Academy’s choices. There are the same five candidates for Best Actor; four out of five for Best Actress (the critics have Charlize Theron instead of Jennifer Lawrence); four out of five match for Best Supporting Actress (the critics prefer Kristen Stewart to Rachel McAdams); three out of five for Best Supporting Actor, and none of the critics’ candidates for actor or director is black.

The director of “Creed,” Ryan Coogler; the film’s lead actor, Michael B. Jordan; and its main supporting actress, Tessa Thompson, aren’t the only great artists to have been unduly passed over in this year’s lists, by the Academy and critics alike (though I’m happy to note that the National Society of Film Critics, of which I’m a member, cited Jordan as Best Actor). I consider Spike Lee’s film “Chi-Raq” to be the best movie of the year and maybe his own best movie—better, in some ways, even than “Do the Right Thing.” It’s aesthetically more daring, with its rhyming text and its element of mythological fantasy. It’s politically more daring in its comprehensive view of the society-wide reforms surrounding guns and gun violence on which constructive local changes would depend. It’s also more conspicuously accomplished—the work of an experienced director who has heightened and refined his skill to lend his movie a thrilling moment-to-moment choreographic swing along with its synoptic perspective. Even critics who may take issue (albeit, in my opinion, narrow-mindedly) with its satirical premise (it’s based on Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata”) are exercising a willful obliviousness in overlooking the virtuosity of its lead actors, Teyonah Parris and Nick Cannon. Their exuberantly expressive yet intricately lyrical performances of the film’s rhyming text are unlike any in this year’s Oscar scramble. The two actors ought to be in a position to make the next movie happen—say, one by a young black director—by the sheer force of well-deserved renown that they’d bring to the table. That’s what a nomination can do.

For that matter, Samuel L. Jackson, playing the onscreen narrator and divine comedian of “Chi-Raq,” would have been a welcome and supremely worthy nominee for Best Supporting Actor. Jackson’s spectacular artistry has become such a commonplace—and has become so unfortunately closely identified with the blowhard overwriting of Quentin Tarantino—that it’s a shock to realize that he has never won an Oscar and has only been nominated once, in 1994, for “Pulp Fiction.” Jackson’s seeming ubiquity also makes it all too easy to overlook the fact that he is one of the most, and perhaps the most, supremely gifted technical actor of our time.

The most important political movement right now is the affirmation—one that shouldn’t need to be made—that black lives matter. It has arisen in response to the unredressed killing of black people by the police, and is all the more pertinent when those killings are, in media and politics alike, widely treated with a shrug. This movement is especially significant at a time when Donald Trump is running ahead of the G.O.P. pack on an explicitly discriminatory platform, when the Republican Party has become in effect a white people’s party, when the voting laws of many states aim squarely at suppressing black people’s vote, when many of the country’s politicians don’t challenge a small white paramilitary group in Oregon and are in the pocket of a large white paramilitary group called the N.R.A. American society is falling into a pathological empathy gap, and I fear that the very notion that black lives matter will remain only a cry of despair until it reaches beyond the judicial system into artistic culture at large. It isn’t with well-meaning films that Hollywood can help; it’s with wide-ranging attention to good, boldly original, and challenging films—including ones that confront the unquestioned and enfeebled assumptions of artistic merit on which Hollywood itself currently runs. Critics may be on the sidelines of the industry, but their role in the cultivation and shaping of taste has a new practical urgency.